


I Don't Claim to be an ‘A’ Student (But I’m Trying to Be)

by aghamora



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Feelings, Friendship, Mutual Pining, Study Date
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 08:39:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12250866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: "A peace offering. It takes him a moment to realize that’s what this is. Something of an olive branch.An overture. Of what, he can’t say exactly."LSAT prep and mutual pining. Heavy on the latter.





	I Don't Claim to be an ‘A’ Student (But I’m Trying to Be)

**Author's Note:**

> I’m minorly annoyed because I intended this to be like, 1/4th of the length it turned out being, but. I guess it’s the opposite of a problem. This came about because of the promo stills for an upcoming episode of season four where Laurel brings Frank an LSAT study book, so I guess we can safely assume Frank is gonna be a lawyer, and the idea of them studying together wouldn’t leave me alone until I wrote it.
> 
> As someone currently prepping for the LSAT, I can confirm it does indeed suck major ass. And yeah, Frank being a lawyer is a HUGE reach because of his lack of a college degree in the show and also a conviction/time in prison, but I tried to smooth those issues over in a way that made a decent amount of sense.
> 
> Title from the song (What a) Wonderful World by Sam Cooke, because it's cute and fits the theme of school/studying/trying to do your best for someone.

“I, uh, I brought you something.”

It throws Frank, the sound of Laurel’s voice; more than anything, the simple fact that the words are directed at _him_. She lags behind after the others clear out, lingering there in Bonnie’s living room with a thick paperback book in her hands, packed full of meticulously-placed white tabs, the words _LSAT Practice Guide_ printed across the front in bold white lettering.

He genuinely stops breathing for a second. Somehow he’d forgotten about her uncanny ability to do that to him.

It takes a second before he regains even the most rudimentary, Neanderthal speech capabilities and clears his throat. “What’s that?”

She holds it out to him, shifting her weight awkwardly from one leg to another. “Bonnie told me about you wanting to go to law school. I just… remembered that I had this, from when I took the LSAT. It still has my tabs and notes and everything. It’s, uh-” She pauses, lowering her eyes. “It’s a few years outdated, but. I thought it might help.”

A peace offering. It takes him a moment to realize that’s what this is. Something of an olive branch.

An overture. Of what, he can’t say exactly.

He bristles, doesn’t reach for it at first. “You didn’t have to, Laurel, I-”

“I want you to have it,” she tells him, standing firm, unyielding. “It’s not doing me any good just sitting in a drawer, so.”

He hesitates, and he doesn’t know why; he has no real reason to. It’s more out of shock than anything else, but finally, he nods, reaching for the book and taking it into his hands, brushing his hand across the glossy cover. When he does, her lips quirk up into something that vaguely resembles a smile.

“Thanks,” he blurts out, turning it over in his hands. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

Frank supposes it isn’t, not really. It’s nothing of significance, a secondhand, recycled old study guide, but coming from Laurel it means more than he can put into any comprehensible sort of words; he might as well be holding a Holy Bible autographed by the good Lord himself. Silence rises up and settles over them like smog, and it’s just as awkward as she looks, probably about as awkward as she _feels_. Her stance is guarded, a degree of standoffishness about it that isn’t overt but is still very much present in the way she carries herself. She won’t look at him, and they’re so close but there might as well be a gully between them, an ocean, something so huge and cavernous there’s no way it can ever be traversed.

His gaze drops down to her stomach, before he can help himself. She still attempts to hide it as best she can, beneath dark, baggy blouses and jackets, but soon there won’t be any hiding it at all from the prying eyes of the world, from those who would judge her. He ponders, for a moment, how time seems to have passed so quickly. How much of her life he’s missed out on.

“So,” she surprises him by breaking the silence first. “What kind of law do you wanna go into?”

He gives a sheepish shrug. “Not sure. Somethin’ in juvenile justice, maybe. Helpin’ kids like I was. Make some kinda difference for them, so they turn out better than I did.”

She relaxes somewhat. “Didn’t you make fun of me for being an idealist, once?”

The tension in the air eases enough for him to chance a grin. “Yeah. Night we met.” She’s grinning back, it occurs to him. It’s tiny, tentative. But there’s no denying it’s there. “I remember.”

“Well, you were right, y’know,” she remarks, wryly, glancing down at her lump of a stomach. “You hit the nail on the head about me getting knocked up. Though… I’m not the idealist I was, anymore.”

There’s no animus towards him in her tone, but it unsettles Frank even so. “That’s too bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just-” He cuts himself off, looking her up and down, troubled for reasons he can’t articulate. “I always liked that about you, ‘s all.”

He can’t blame her; half a dozen murders and other sundry felonies would take the idealism out of damn near anyone. There was a light in her eyes the night they met that isn’t there, anymore; a light that’s been snuffed out, a little oxygen-starved candleflame. She looks exhausted, these days, but it’s deeper than the physical. It’s world-weariness. She’s too young to be so jaded, so sick of living, going through the motions of her days with no real gusto at all.

“Thanks for this, though,” he repeats, gesturing to the book. “I’m lost as hell. I keep tryin’, but I can’t wrap my head around this stuff. Be lucky if I pull a 130 at this point.”

Laurel pauses. She seems to be thinking, some invisible gears turning behind her eyes, before finally she says, “I, um… I could help you study. You know. If you wanted.”

The offer takes him aback for what must be the hundredth time this afternoon alone. It’s sincere, as far as he can tell; not one she’s making disingenuously, in the hopes he’ll decline and let her off the hook. She’s not the type to do something like that.

Frank demurs, immediately. “Nah, don’t want you takin’ the time, it’s-”

“I’m six months pregnant, Frank,” she breathes the words out, folding her arms in good-natured exasperation. “And I have virtually no social life, and no firm in their right mind is gonna hire me to intern when I’m like this. I have the time.”

“Okay, then. Yeah.” He nods, as stunned as he is touched. “Yeah, I’d… I’d like that.”

“Friday night work? Or do you – I don’t know… have a date, or something?”

She feigns nonchalance, but there’s weight behind the words. Curiosity. She’s fishing for a real answer.

Later, he thinks, he’ll contemplate the implications of that. But for now-

He just chuckles. “I don’t have any dates anymore. Just a hot date with a cruel mistress named LSAT.”

“Good,” she affirms. He doesn’t think he imagines the note of breathlessness in her voice, the faint touch of color on her cheeks. “Because… if we’re doing this, I’ll make you work.”

“Yes ma’am. Wouldn’t expect anything less.”

She’s smiling as she turns to go. Frank can’t remember the last time he saw her smile like that.

 

~

 

She arrives at seven on the dot on Friday night, punctual as ever, and they settle in together on the couch that has become his humble abode at Bonnie’s place, papers and pens and books strewn about on the coffee table. He makes a point to clean up, before she arrives, though all _cleaning up_ consists of is folding his only blanket and rearranging a few pillows. He wants to make it nice for her, though.

As nice as a technically-homeless bum can make his couch slash temporary apartment, anyway.

He’s nervous and jittery like a damn teenager. He feels like an idiot – and quite possibly he is, in many ways, but not enough of an idiot to pretend that this is anything more than what it is: a study session. Not a date. They’re not anything to each other, anymore.

Friends, maybe. He thinks he’d like that: being her friend. He thinks he’d like that a lot.

She starts with logic games, first, because it’s the section where he needs the most help, where he’s most clueless. The questions genuinely fuck with his head; they barely sound like English, but somehow when Laurel reads them aloud in that low, steady, lilting voice of hers, it makes the pieces shift into place just a tad bit more.

“Okay, so. The trick to these is learning to recognize the kind of game they are and the kind of diagram you need. Drawing them out so you can visualize them helps, like, a lot. This one has the members of one group split into two committees, so you want what’s called… a mono-group selection diagram. That’ll look like this. It’s one of the easier ones.” She leans forward, and a few deft strokes of her pencil later, she’s holding the paper out for him to see. “Then, after that, you can diagram the rules with arrows, so you have that information easy to reference for the questions. You’ll just get caught in a loop if you have to keep going back and rereading the rules over and over, trust me.”

She’s close, closer than she’s been to him in ages. He’s always had a touch of attention deficit and this proximity to her now certainly isn’t helping, but he shakes it off, makes himself refocus and nod.

“Yeah. Okay.”

“So. First question,” she continues, steady and intensely focused, and shit, she’s so smart it makes his head spin, sometimes. “This is a typical one they’ll start you off with. The quickest way to do this is to start with the first rule and work your way down to see if the first list violates any of them. Once you find one that follows all the rules, that’s your answer. Easy enough, right?”

He thinks he’d agree with her on just about anything, right now, and so he nods eagerly. “Think so. I just… I gotta stare at ‘em for ten minutes before they start to make any sense.”

“You have thirty-five minutes for this part, so. Not sure that’s a viable strategy. But we’ll worry about speed later, though. Just… try the first one for now.”

He does, leaning forward and following each line with his finger as he reads. He references her diagram, now and then, and finally circles option ‘B’ with a proud, puffed-up little grin, only for Laurel to shake her head.

“No, it can’t be B. That violates rule 3. If Q is on the first committee, T can’t be there too. They’re mutually exclusive, see?”

His confidence withers immediately. “Oh.”

She notices, and gives him an understanding half-smile. “It’s all right. It’s easy to get the rules switched up by accident.”

“You said that’s the easiest question, though,” he says, disheartened all at once. The feeling knots tight in his chest; that familiar stupidity. Worthlessness. “If I can’t get that one right, how am I gonna do the rest?”

“Don’t get discouraged, it’s not the-”

“Annalise told me once that I could never be a lawyer ‘cause I got no basic common sense. I’m startin’ to think… maybe she was right.” He swallows, avoiding her eyes, ashamed and frustrated with himself. “I’m no good at this. You know I’ve always been dumb.”

Street smarts don’t translate to book smarts. He should’ve known this was just a pipe dream, that there’s no changing for people like him, no starting over. He doesn’t know why he hadn’t realized it sooner.

“You’re not dumb.”

The vehemence in her words startles him so much that his head snaps in her direction, all at once. She’s facing him fully now, so close their shoulders brush, and there’s a resoluteness about her, a steely determination in her eyes, in the set of her jaw. It takes him a moment to realize what it is he’s witnessing, here; a sudden resurgence of the old Laurel, fiery and fierce and resolved. He’s certain he’s useless. For some godforsaken reason, she’s just as certain he isn’t, and she’s dead set on proving it to him.

“Laurel…”

“You’re not dumb,” she insists, again, not easing up. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she was almost angry with him, but her words aren’t harsh, snappish; they’re just firm. “Annalise didn’t know what she was talking about. You’re smart, and… and I know you can do this. I was terrible at logic games at first. Everyone is. You can’t get discouraged if you don’t pick it up right away.” She softens her voice. “So don’t call yourself dumb. You’re not.”

All he can do is stare, for a moment, mouth half-agape, eyes wide. The silence fills up the room, takes on a life of its own, and by the time he finds his voice, it feels like a decade has passed, just staring into her eyes, letting her words roll over him and burrow their way into his chest.

“No one’s, uh… No one’s ever done that, before,” he confesses, properly chastised, damn near speechless.

Laurel furrows her brow. “Done what?”

“Told me I’m smart.” He pauses, swallowing. “Believed in me.”

“Yeah, well. Get used to it,” she replies, straightening her back. “Because I do. And you are. And… I’m gonna make it my mission to get you into Middleton Law.”

“Middleton? Their median LSAT’s a 166; no way I can pull that off. Plus, I got an online GED and bachelor’s from a damn prison. Admissions’d take one look at my application and laugh.”

“You won’t know until you try,” Laurel shoots back, that passion again bleeding into her tone, that steadfast belief which she doesn’t seem to have even remotely considered might be misplaced, in him. “And that’s why I’m here. Laurel’s LSAT Lessons are officially in session. I’m not letting you out of this now.”

It’s a longshot, him getting into Middleton; really, him getting into _anywhere_. At best, a statistical improbability. They both know that. His juvenile record was expunged, and somehow by some God-sent miracle he has no other convictions; there’s nothing keeping him from sitting for the bar. And Laurel is bound and determined to see this through – and well, hell, if Laurel believes in him, then he supposes he has no choice other than to believe in himself, too.

“Aye aye cap’n,” he says, mock-seriously. “So we do it. Set our sights on Middleton. It’s one hell of a lofty ambition, I gotta say.”

“Shoot for the moon,” Laurel quotes. “Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars, right?”

They fall back into the questions, and it’s an interminably long struggle, but finally, finally he makes it to the end, emerging with somewhat of a better understanding of the concepts, of her diagrams, all lines and letters and arrows. She’s beautiful, in the dim lamplight, skin softly gilded and cheeks flushed, her hair disheveled from the long day. She’s attentive to his questions, patient, never frustrated or disappointed when he doesn’t understand.

If he didn’t love her before, then he has no clue what it is he’s feeling now. It feels bigger. All-consuming. Positively soul-crushing.

Her stomach growls audibly halfway through their fourth problem, and Frank glances over, a grin playing at his lips. “Hungry?”

“Yeah,” she mutters, sighing, not looking up from their work. “I skipped dinner.”

Frank goes still. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I just… didn’t feel like eating.” She leans back against the couch, setting down her pencil. “I’m fine.”

She does that habitually, he knows; skips meals, eats on an irregular schedule, sometimes only cramming a barely nutritious granola bar down her throat to sustain her through breakfast and lunch. He doesn’t know why he’d assumed she’d do any differently now, though the stakes are so much higher, though it’s no longer just her she’s eating for.

“You know you can’t be doin’ that. You gotta eat. Kid’s gotta eat.”

Something flashes in her eyes. Guilt. Fear. Perhaps a mix of both. He knows her feelings about the baby are mixed at best; he could never hope to understand the intricacies of them, but he _can_ see that she’s afraid, plain as day. “I know. I, uh… I know, I just…”

She drifts off, sullen. And then, like a swift sucker punch right to the gut, it hits him.

“How ‘bout that’s how I repay you?” he suggests. “You help me study, I make you a good meal. We both win.”

“You don’t have to repay me, Frank, I’m doing this because I wanna help.”

“I know. Just lemme cook for you,” he urges, voice dropping an octave, edging far too close to tenderness. “Okay? I’d feel better if I knew you were eatin’ at least one healthy meal a week. Plus, hey. It’s brain food, ain’t it?”

She relents with a grin. And he knows they have a deal.

 

~

 

One week later, and they’re back at it; always at Bonnie’s place, since she insists her apartment is cramped and filthy and borderline uninhabitable, and given the admittedly limited amount of Wes’s old place he’d seen, he believes her. He’s not sure it’s healthy for her, living in that place with a ghost in her bed, stuck in the past while the rest of the world moves forward without her, and so the more he’s able to lure her out, the better, as far as he’s concerned.

Bit by bit, during the week as they cross paths, she seems to perk up. It’s given her a cause; a sort of purpose, helping him. Her presence just gives him purpose in general.

It’s a win-win situation.

“Okay. So. Reading comprehension. Comparatively, this part sucks the least,” Laurel begins, her study guide spread open before them, tabs sticking out of it from all angles. “You like reading. This shouldn’t be hard for you. Plus, you read a lot of stuff like this for Annalise. Cases, trial transcripts. It’ll be a piece of cake.”

He gives her a doubtful look. “I think you’re overestimating my abilities here.”

“ _I_ think you don’t give yourself enough credit,” she retorts, almost playfully. “Anyway, there’s four sections, and then questions after each one. My strategy was always to read the questions then the passages to know what I was looking for, first, but everyone does it differently. You just have to find what…”

Her voice fades out of his consciousness, grows distant, muffled, almost as if he’s underwater trying to listen to a sound miles above the surface. His mind drifts, eyes falling to her lips, those rosy, kissable curves, the graceful dip of her cupid’s bow; the hollows of her cheeks, filling in more and more by the day; the way the table lamp catches the faint copper tones in her hair, dancing in them. He’s transfixed by her silhouette, the gentleness of her features offset by her sharp, stormy blue-grey eyes, and he’s never believed in all that pregnancy glow bullshit but he thinks she _is_ glowing, somehow: glowing with all the light and promise contained inside her, that tiny seed of hope. There’s a quiet strength about her he doesn’t think words can capture.

He still loves her. Sometimes, times like this, it hits him square in the chest with the force of a cannonball, explodes into shrapnel, tears him open. He can’t imagine ever feeling anything less than utterly destroyed by the force of it.

He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Frank realizes he’s staring when Laurel’s voice comes crashing unceremoniously into his reverie. “Frank? Are you listening?”

He snaps out of it at once, shaking his head. “Sorry. Sorry, yeah.”

Laurel seems more confused than annoyed. “I asked you which one you wanted to start with. Which passage. There’s a law-related one, a science one…”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, I got, uh… distracted.”

He curses himself the instant the words leave his mouth. Now, she just looks infinitely more confused.

“By what?”

Fuck. Shit. He’s backed himself into a corner. _You. I got distracted by you._ He can’t say that. He can’t say anything – but a moment passes, and understanding gradually bleeds into her eyes, and it turns out he doesn’t have to.

“Oh,” is all she says, the realization sweeping her features like a tide. And that’s _all_ she says for a very long time.

He’s sure she knows. She couldn’t possibly _not_ know. He’ll be the first to admit he’s obvious about it; he does a shit job of hiding the way he feels about her, always has, probably always will. Of course she knows.

“Sorry,” he blurts out, again, in a desperate attempt to salvage this situation. “Won’t happen again.”

Surprisingly, though, Laurel doesn’t seem even marginally discomfited. She looks almost flattered, in a peculiar way.

There’s something else in her eyes, too. Something she’s tried to tie a brick to and sink to the bottom of the ocean many a time, but something that keeps floating stubbornly to the surface nonetheless. Something Frank is going to choose not to name, in the interest of not disrupting this rhythm they’ve fallen into – because it’s something good, something real. It feels like they’re working towards something, together.

Why fuck that up by bringing feelings into it.

“No. It’s okay,” she remarks, finally. She gives a little joyless smirk that fails to take root in her eyes. “When you weigh five-hundred pounds and are bloated and swollen everywhere and just generally disgusting… That’s actually a much-needed ego boost.”

He knocks his elbow into hers, in a lame attempt to cheer her up. “Aw c’mon. You’re not disgusting.”

Laurel scoffs. “Okay, there’s no point in flattering me. I don’t have extra credit to give you.”

“So I’ll do it anyway, brownie points or not. I’m on a mission to be your star pupil here.” He pauses, earnest. “And I mean it.”

She shakes her head, gnawing on a smile. Her cheeks are burning red. It may be just a hot flash; he knows she gets those with increasing frequency, now.

It may be another reason entirely. And that he supposes that’s _his_ ego boost for the night.

“I hate you,” she settles on saying, finally, no venom in the words. Nothing but blessedly light laughter.

Once, not so long ago, he would’ve believed those words coming from her. Now, though, they just make him smile.

“No you don’t,” he replies, raising his eyebrows, and Laurel’s smile widens, the pearls of her teeth just beginning to peak through. It’s more rewarding than any praise she could offer him; just the sight of that smile, the knowledge that it’s for him.

“No,” she admits, and her eyes pierce and swallow, drag him under, drown him in their depths. “I don’t.”

She leaves a few hours later with a Tupperware container packed to the brim with spaghetti and meatballs, and he’s willing to call the night a resounding success.

 

~

 

She’s unusually quiet, one night during their lessons almost a month later – and she’s always been the quiet one, but there’s something ominous about her silence as she sits beside him, delving deep into the logical reasoning section of the LSAT – which is probably only a six out of ten on the scale of overall shittiness, from a holistic standpoint. She’s distracted while going over the problems with him, though, losing her train of thought several times, and she tries, jokingly, to chalk it up to pregnancy brain, but he sees right through the charade as easily as he would Plexiglas.

Things are different, now, her due date looming over them. It feels as if there’s some giant countdown timer above her head, ticking down the minutes and seconds and milliseconds, and with each passing day she withdraws, a sense of doom following her wherever she goes, weighing her down like sandbags tied to her ankles. It’s worse than usual, tonight, though he can’t say why.

He knows her well enough to know when she has something on her mind. They’re on the same wavelength, always have been, and she’s thinking so loudly he can practically hear her, like radio interference, static clouding his mind. After a while, he insists they set aside the book and take a break, and Laurel assents, drawing her legs up underneath her on the couch, hugging a pillow, and drifting, barely listening as he tries to joke with her, cheer her up however he can.

“Hey,” he says, suddenly, sliding as close as he dares, tossing aside any pretense of levity. There’s always an implicit barrier between them, a line he knows better than to cross, though tonight it feels like it’s receding bit by bit. He feels like she needs him close, right now. “How are you?”

They’d jumped right into practice problems as soon as she’d arrived; he hadn’t even asked. It’s easy to get caught up in all this, in the logic games and dense text and charts and diagrams and legalese. She’s attentive to him. Now, it’s his turn to do the same for her.

“Fine,” she lies, flippantly, and he presses his lips together.

There’s a note of prompting in his voice, trying to wheedle a real answer out of her. “Laurel…”

“Scared,” Laurel admits, at last, heaving a sigh. “I’m scared. I think… something bad’s gonna happen. To me. Or the baby. Or both of us. I just have this… this feeling.”

They still have two months, yet Frank knows better than to think those two months will pass on any sort of normal, linear timeline; the days now seem fast-forwarded, skipped over like scenes in a film. She seems to have a prophetic, nagging feeling about this; one that’s been on her mind enough to trouble her beyond measure, and it could just be a product of her anxious mind but perhaps she _knows_ somehow, in her bones.

He melts, inching closer. He dares to take her hand; he wouldn’t, normally, but she seems to need an anchor, something to tether her to the ground while her mind drifts. “Why do you think that?”

“Because,” she answers, without hesitation. “Something bad always happens.”

She’s not wrong; everything in their lives seems to end in some form of calamity or other. She’s endured more than her fair share of suffering. By now, he’s not sure how much more she can realistically take. He can only hope and pray they won’t have to find out.

Frank shakes his head. This time, he’s the one who’s adamant, unshakably certain. “Not this time.”

She wavers. “Frank-”

“You say you know I’m smart enough for this?” he interrupts her gently. “To pass this thing, go on, make somethin’ of my sorry life? Then _I’m_ sayin’ I know nothing bad is gonna happen. You wouldn’t let it. Neither would I.” She lowers her eyes, and he moves closer, undeterred. “Hey. Look at me. I know nothing bad is gonna happen. I _know_.”

She doesn’t look like she believes him for a second. But she makes herself smile anyway, that slow, sad smile that’s become her trademark. “If you say so.”

“Let’s get back to it,” he coaxes her, sensing her need for a distraction, and he’s more than willing to provide that for her. “We’ll take a break in a bit. It’s pasta fazool night; my ma’s recipe. It’s to die for, lemme tell ya.”

Laurel nods, sitting up and plopping down on the carpet before the coffee table, sitting cross-legged with a blanket spread over her lap. And it takes her a while before the tension in her body finally eases, before she takes a breath and throws herself back into teaching him, all her soft words and tender assurances and laser-sharp focus. He loses himself in it so quickly, drawn into her gravity, hopelessly locked in her orbit like the moon to the earth; always present, always watching, steady as a sentinel above, but never venturing close enough to touch.

And as she goes on about logical reasoning and flawed arguments and conditional statements and contrapositives, again, he finds himself dumbstruck, distracted, despite his best efforts to the contrary. All at once he’s blind and deaf and dumb, and she’s all he can see, all he can hear. The rest of the world is muted around them. Someone’s pressed pause on the universe itself.

She believes in him. He’s not used to that, to having someone’s faith placed squarely in him. The few times it has been, he’s fucked it up spectacularly – but he won’t, this time. Laurel sees something worthy in him, something good when he sees none himself, and he’ll prove to her that her belief isn’t unfounded, no matter what it takes. She’s decided he’s her cause, by some miracle of fate.

And he’s more than willing to be her cause. He’s more than willing to be her anything.


End file.
